Bishop Paul Tighe on Vatican communications

Tuesday 1 March 2016, by SIGNIS

Vatican City, Brussels, March 1st, 2016 (CNA/SIGNIS). The Catholic News Agency (CNA) recently met with Msgr. Paul Tighe, who has been the top Irishman and go-to man in the Vatican when it comes to media. Now, he is the new adjunct-secretary to the Pontifical Council for Culture.His episcopal ordination took place on Saturday, Feb. 27, in St. Peter’s Basilica.

“A lot of my work in communications was looking at how digital culture is changing our world, and to see the strengths of that and the things that we might need to engage with,” Msgr. Tighe told CNA. He said there’s “a strong continuity between the area of communications and culture,” and said that at least for now, a lot of his new role at the Pontifical Council for Culture will likely be focused on digital culture.

“That’s the culture I’ve been most familiar with,” he said, adding that “increasingly various expressions of culture, be it in literature, be it in music, are expressing themselves in true digital platforms, which are transformed into many of the traditional cultural industries, if we want to call it that.”

After the Pope established the new Secretariat for Communications in June 2015, naming Italian Msgr. Dario Vigano as its first head, Msgr. Tighe’s work was officially complete, leaving him the possibility of either being reassigned to another position in the Curia, or to an Irish diocese. Msgr. Tighe’s appointment as adjunct-secretary to Culture was announced Dec. 19, 2015, as well as his nomination as bishop. He was assigned to the titular Episcopal See of Drivasto in Albania.

He told CNA that the move to Culture “was a surprise” in the sense that he was expecting to return to Ireland, and that “interestingly” one of the things he had discussed with his Archbishop in Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, “was coming back and doing something precisely in the area of culture, public forum debates, the place of the faith and how it engages in the life of Ireland today.”

Msgr. Tighe also said that even if he is not directly involved in Vatican communications anymore, he believes the current reform is going well, and is sticking to the plan the commission had developed.